networking - Identify a non-computer network device?

Question

I'm current working on a program that scans my network and discoveres computers and devices on the network. I use various operations to find data on the devices I discover, but want to distinguish the network devices from computers. And I'm wondering if anyone knows how I could do this?

I looked a bit at SNMP, and tried connecting to my network printer, router and modem. But I seem to only be able to connect to the printer, neither the router or modem responds.

Is there another way to identify what kind of a device an IP address belongs to?

Answer 1

Using a command line tool such as nmap you can finger print the device which can give you all sorts of information.

Perhaps you can call nmap via c# and read back the response.

Another alternative is to look up the network chip vendor of a given MAC address. But I'm not sure how much detail that will give you.

Here is the example from the nmap site:

# nmap -O -v scanme.nmap.org

Starting Nmap ( http://nmap.org )
Nmap scan report for scanme.nmap.org (64.13.134.52)
Not shown: 994 filtered ports
PORT    STATE  SERVICE
22/tcp  open   ssh
25/tcp  closed smtp
53/tcp  open   domain
70/tcp  closed gopher
80/tcp  open   http
113/tcp closed auth
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 2.6.X
OS details: Linux 2.6.20-1 (Fedora Core 5)
Uptime guess: 11.433 days (since Thu Sep 18 13:13:01 2008)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Difficulty=204 (Good luck!)
IP ID Sequence Generation: All zeros

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.21 seconds
           Raw packets sent: 2021 (90.526KB) | Rcvd: 23 (1326B)